Could this be the perfect LED light for a scrubber?

[Ace25]

I just found this site.. I am drooling. I think these may be a perfect replacement to T5's on a SM100 style scrubber if they fit, if not a small redesign to the plans to make them fit for the DIY wouldn't be an issue. The 50w seems like it would be a good replacement as far as light output is concerned, the 100w one would seem to fit better.

http://www.eshinesystems.com/growlight.htm

50 watt using 45 1watt Epistar 660nm red and 5 1watt bridgelux 455nm blue(standard version)
Tested out PAR value, over 650 PAR reading from 4" distance
Cost: $68

100 watt using 90 1watt Epistar 660nm red and 10 1watt bridgelux 455nm blue(standard version)
Tested out PAR value, over 1200 PAR reading from 4" distance
Cost: $122

[SantaMonica]

How do you find the price?

[Ace25]

You gotta open a chat with someone on the site, usually a chat window pops up in the lower right. You can ask them prices or they will just email you the price list for the month in .pdf format, they just ask for an email address and a few minutes later you have the prices for everything.

The Cree 60w LED light is $185, that is a really good deal for a Cree light and would work great over something like a 29G tank.

[rygh]

Wow, sweet.

But 45 red to 5 blue seems a bit odd though. A bit low on blue.
Or maybe not. Not like there are a lot of good studies.
But sure seems like aquatic plants like a bit more blue.

[Doompie]

That 50 watt version looks very neat, good dimensions, anyone know if this is going to work? Or is the color temp. Way off?

Price is very good...


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.492498,3.617727

[Ace25]

I am running all 660nm red LEDs on my scrubber now because I found blue to not help at all, I would actually have near bald spots on the screen where the royal blue LEDs where when I tested them. I can only go 3 days tops on mine because the screen grows so fast with the 660nm red LEDs. I would have rather seen 50 reds and no blues, but 5 blues isn't going to make any difference negatively IMO.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Just FYI, those are promotional prices, or so they say. That might just be a selling point. I got quoted $75 and $125 on the chat.

He said the 50W unit is normally $90-$100 and the 100W is $150, then shipping for 2 50W is $70 and 2 100W is $80.

So your real (promotional) price for 2 of the 50W units is more like $110/each and for 2 of the 100W units is more like $205/each. (EDIT: oops math error, I meant $165 each)

They're also Chinese LEDs, which historically have been less reliable. If something goes wrong and you have to send it back, it could take weeks to get a replacement. More importantly, they likely under-drive the cheap chips to make sure they don't blow, resulting in less power than if you used quality chips and drove them harder.

It seems that scrubbing with LEDs is approaching the breaking point. So I can't hide my secret anymore.

I've been doing quite a bit of research into having an LED fixture custom made for a scrubber. I've been working with a reputable USA based company to develop a custom LED scrubber fixture. I've spent hours on the phone with them and have learned a great deal about LED grow lights, spectrum, intensity, and the industry in general. I believe that now is the time to share some of what I've learned.

There is a basis for adding blues into the mixture. For plant growth, NASA and Cornell did large studies on the matter. Blues alone, especially royal blues (wrong wavelength) and too much of them in proportion to reds, will not work well. This has been shown now anecdotally by Ace.

Ace, I find it interesting that you are running all 660nm. In the hydro industry, they did a test where they tried to grow plants under strictly 660 and strictly 630. 630 beat 660 by a long shot, simply because 630s are more intense, watt for watt. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts if you mix them together in the proper ratio, as is the case with blues and reds. That may change for aquatic submerged plants, but theoretically should not change for algae with thin laminar flow on a vertical substrate.

The efficiency of a T5HO (for photosynthetic activity) is actually about 34%. Grow light LED is roughly double. This means you need a lot less to match T5HO, at least for what we care about. This is why your 660nm scrubber is producing so much algae.

A couple things that people need to be aware of is that these fixtures eshine is selling say they're 50W or 100W because they have 50 or 100 1W LEDs. That is not the actual power draw of these fixtures. That's marketing, and it's not just them that are doing this, it's an industry wide thing. The guy I'm working with clued me in on that.

The 100W fixture is likely more like 60W, fans included. The reason is that 1W LEDs originally pulled 1W, but then got more efficient and now pull less to achieve the same lumen output, but it would be bad marketing to call them 0.5W LEDs, which is what they really are. Same goes for 2W and 3W. So making an apples-to-apples comparison based on wattage or PAR can get you in trouble.

EDIT: regarding PAR, when you're talking about comparing T5HO PAR and LED grow light PAR, you can get in trouble too. PAR tuned to the plant grow spectrum using LED compared to PAR from a T5HO grow lamp will result in a much higher proportion of PAR used by the algae in the LED fixture. So if you have 600 PAR on a T5HO and 600 PAR on LED, the algae might use 75-80% of the PAR from the LED versus 35% from the T5HO. What is unknown, really, is whether this is good or bad (for algae). Can photo-bleaching of the algae occur at this intensity? Can cutting the light period avoid this? We don't know...

That all being said, those 50W fixtures would probably be a comparable replacement for a 2-lamp T5HO fixture - same "wattage" but really half the wattage (I bet it pulls 30-35 watts), but possibly double the intensity in the range we care about, so those cancel each other out. Using the Chinese LEDs though, you don't know for sure if that's a comparable or reliable replacement for the 2 lamp T5HO. It's probably close enough though.

So with all this considered, and this new fixture brought to light, I believe we are about to enter the next phase of LED scrubbers. We have progressed from "experimental" to "untested".

The coverage and intensity issues of 3W LEDs at small distances from the fixture have been an issue. The 1W array fixtures solve that, as well as allow for proper ratios and distribution. This is exactly what I've been working on, they just beat me to the punch.

I will tell you that the fixture that I will have in my hands about 2 weeks has all Cree LEDs (except for a few they don't make) and will blow these fixtures away. It won't be as cheap, but I'm a "you get what you pay for" kind of guy. I'm going to be testing it on a high-nutrient 180g tank.

[Ace25]

Just FYI, those are promotional prices, or so they say. That might just be a selling point. I got quoted $75 and $125 on the chat.

This is what I got in my email for the Grow Lights.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Yeah I asked for a price sheet and the guy wouldn't give me one. Must have been trying to squeeze a few extra $ out of me!

He said the price changes depending on what his 'boss decides' or something like that.

I notice that those are all are using 660nm Deep Reds. I see no reason why they would want to do this based on what I've learned. 660s and 630 stimulate different types of growth in plants, something about broader leaves vs longer reaching plants, I don't recall.

This might be one of those things that may or may not correlate to algae as we grow it. But as SM say, flow and intensity trump spectrum, at least in T5HO. So if you blast algae with enough red, no matter what it is, it's gonna grow.

One thing I have noticed about all of the LED builds is that there does not appear to be 'burning' of the algae. I wonder if the reason for that is that when the portions of the spectrum that are not primarily used are plentiful, the algae reacts negatively. Blasting it with only the most beneficial spectrum mixture might have benefits that we haven't seen yet. I guess I'm gonna find out.

[Reefkeeper82]

You guys are truly pioneers in our hobby lol. Keeping on going!

Would be nice to setup an SM-100 with LEDs instead of T5HOs. Not having to replace bulbs every 3 months would be sweet and well worth the spending.

Soon, we might be able to achieve more compact scrubbers to handle larger tanks. I'm planning my 190G rimless so looking forward to seeing more results in the near future.

Scott T.